Appeal
from the Superior Court No. 3PA-14-036 DL, Third Judicial
District, Palmer, Gregory Heath, Judge.
Renee
McFarland, Assistant Public Defender, and Quinlan Steiner,
Public Defender, Anchorage, for the Appellant.
June
Stein, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Criminal
Appeals, Anchorage, and Craig W. Richards, Attorney General,
Juneau, for the Appellee.
Before: Mannheimer, Chief Judge, Allard, Judge, and Suddock,
Superior Court Judge.[*]
OPINION
MANNHEIMER Judge.
Under
Alaska Delinquency Rule 21(a), delinquency proceedings are
tried to the court unless the juvenile requests a jury trial.
Rule 21(a) also states that a request for jury trial must be
made "no later than 20 days before any scheduled trial
date" (unless there is good reason to allow the request
to be made with less advance notice). The primary question
presented in this appeal is how to interpret the phrase
"scheduled trial date".
In
Alaska, most criminal and delinquency cases are not given a
specific date for trial until just before they are actually
tried.
Instead,
if a case is to be tried, it will be placed among a group of
cases that are presumptively ready for trial, and the entire
group of cases will be scheduled for a status hearing or
conference. This status hearing or conference is sometimes
called a "trial call", or a "calendar
call", or simply a "scheduling hearing". But
regardless of its label, the function of this court
proceeding is (1) to determine which cases among the group
are, indeed, ready for trial, and (2) to establish the order
in which the individual cases will be tried. Generally, the
first case to be tried is given a date certain, and the
others are put in a "trailing" status. That is,
those cases are brought to trial whenever the preceding case
is resolved and the assigned judge becomes available.
For
simplicity's sake, we will refer to this court proceeding
as a "trial call" in this opinion.
The
issue in this appeal is whether the requirement of 20
days' advance notice for requesting a jury trial should
be calculated based on the date of the trial call, or whether
this deadline should be calculated based on the specific
trial date and time that the court sets later, as the court
works its way through the list of cases to be tried.
For the
reasons explained in this opinion, we conclude that when a
minor's case is not given a specific trial date at the
very beginning, but is instead scheduled for a trial call,
the 20 days' advance notice specified in Delinquency Rule
21(a) is calculated based on the date of that trial call.
Underlying
facts
The
State filed a delinquency petition against M.H., alleging
that he had committed theft. In November 2014, the superior
court set M.H.'s delinquency case for a trial call on
January 6, 2015.
The
attorneys handling M.H.'s delinquency case appeared at
the trial call on January 6th, and they returned to court on
January 8th. At that time, they announced that M.H.'s
case had not been resolved, and that M.H. still wanted to go
to trial. However, M.H.'s attorney also stated that she
wished to raise a suppression issue.
The
court allowed M.H.'s attorney to file the suppression
motion the next day (January 9th). At that time, the
prosecutor assigned to M.H.'s case noted that M.H. had
not filed a request for a jury trial, so the prosecutor
suggested that the court could resolve all of the pending
matters by holding a combined evidentiary hearing and bench
trial the following week (on January 15th).
In
response to the prosecutor's suggestion, M.H.'s
attorney declared that M.H. wanted a jury trial. The superior
court denied this request as untimely.
On
January 15th, the court held the evidentiary hearing and
denied M.H.'s suppression motion. The court then
proceeded to hold a bench trial on the underlying allegation
against M.H. At the conclusion of this trial, the court found
that M.H. had committed the charged theft, and the court
adjudged M.H. to be a delinquent minor.
Why
the 20 days' advance notice specified in Delinquency Rule
21(a) is to be calculated based on the date of the trial
call
As we
explained earlier, Delinquency Rule 21(a) states that a
minor's request for a jury trial normally must be made
"no later than 20 days before any scheduled trial
date".
M.H.
argues that when a delinquency case is included among the
group of cases at a trial call, the phrase "scheduled
trial date" refers to the specific trial date and time
that the court later establishes for the delinquency case as
...